A cadre of journalists, authors, and creatives from around the world recently took part in a two-day event focused on how the media shapes today’s narratives. The University of Tulsa’s Switchyard hosted the symposium at 101 Archer in the Tulsa Arts District.
The event, titled “Covering Chaos,” included roundtable discussions and panels on topics like the impact of social media echo chambers, the enduring value of in-depth reporting, and the use of fear as a political tool.
Ted Genoways, editor of Switchyard magazine and a president’s professor of media studies at UTulsa, welcomed attendees on Friday afternoon. The opening discussion featured Molly O’Toole and Jeff Sharlet with talk back by Mazin Sidahmed and Genoways.
Saturday saw a full day of panels and discussions. During “Echo Chambers: The Destructive Effects of Silos and Misinformation,” Peter Slevin, a writer for The New Yorker, reminded the audience that journalists and writers “aren’t dead yet.”
“We may be the heart of the best resistance we’ve got to Trumpism and its root in disinformation,” he said, referring to the president who was sworn in earlier that week. “We need to be a bulwark against the unprecedented lies that we’re up against and how they’re resonating. We need to hold the liars, the hypocrites, the grifters to account, as hard as that is in their moment of triumph. We need to understand what we’re up against, which is lying as a strategy.”
Panelist Gal Beckerman, an editor at The Atlantic, said people do what they do because they have a sense of values, not because of its effectiveness.
“You know you do what you do because you understand that you are staying true to a certain idea of truth, and I think that I would say, ‘Double down,’ and the doubling down might get hard,” he said. “It might indeed have the repercussions the dissidents have faced in other countries.”
During “Merchants of Fear: Stirring Hatred for Political Gain,” Eliza Barclay, who edits climate, energy, and environment coverage for The New York Times opinion section, started the panel by sharing that she and others increasingly see hate spewed at technology and infrastructure, including wind turbines, electric vehicles, and solar panels.
Each panelist spoke about a different event, person, or time period and particular place.
C.J. Janovy, a journalist and author of the book “No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas,” said America has a bathroom problem.
“We’ve given bathrooms way too much power,” Janovy said. “Transgender folks are a minority so minuscule that not many people actually know someone who is trans, so they have no opportunity to hear trans stories or to even try to understand trans lives.”
Janovy said in the past few years, lawmakers in dozens of states have proposed or passed hundreds of bills banning transgender people, not just from bathrooms, but from accessing health care and other necessities.
“Demonizing this tiny group of people proved so potent that it’s getting credit for helping Republicans take the House, the Senate, and the presidency,” Janovy said.
Journalist and essayist Siddhartha Deb, meanwhile, spoke about the similarities between India Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Trump.
“The truth is that neither Modi nor Trump rose from nowhere or were simply voted in by so-called ‘bad guys,’” Deb said. “They emerged from a global system that values violence and wealth over all else, one that will not come to terms with climate collapse on a planetary scale, that will not come to terms with the kind of inequality and precarity that the majority of the world population lives in, one that divides the world into winners and losers, into advanced democracies and fledgling democracies.”

The Switchyard event also featured a lunchtime talk with Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee), an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and UTulsa affiliate faculty member, as well as several other engaging panels. The symposium also coincided with the publication of the latest edition of the award-winning Switchyard magazine.